Little Farmers Cay

Chanticleer
Stephen and Roberta Arnold
Mon 17 Jan 2011 19:41

23:57.8126N 76:19.2405W

 

Monday January 17, 2011

 

Yesterday we left Black Point and had a nice 11 mile sale to Little Farmers Cay. Little Farmers is a small community – the guide book says 55 people, but judging by the crowd a church yesterday thought it might be closer to 100. But after church a bunch of worshipers got into boats and left so perhaps 55 isn’t far off.

 

Being Sunday everything was closed so we just walked around, that didn’t take long. Later today we’ll head in to do some quick grocery shopping, pay for our mooring and hopefully find an internet connection.

 

We took a mooring because the currents where we are have scrubbed the sand off the areas where it is deep enough for us to anchor. The boat tends to lay to the current so we change directions at every tide change and with the thin layer of sand didn’t want to risk the anchor coming free should it even catch.

 

We learned a valuable lesson about moorings here. After we were tied up I got in the dinky and used the ‘lookie-bucket”  (a bucket where the bottom has been replaced with clear plastic) to check out the mooring. It was a refrigerator size piece of concrete and the rope to chain splice looked ok. Later that day I thought more about what I saw and realized that when the tide changed and we changed directions the rope part of the mooring would be rubbing against the concrete. Sure enough I checked again after the tide changed and the rope was rubbing on the block. The mooring consisted of an eye in  the top of the concrete to which a length of chain was attached and then some rope that was attached to the mooring ball. The concrete block was not sitting flat on the seabed because of the uneven bottom and the chain had somehow managed to get caught under the concrete block. I checked a nearby mooring and it had the same problem. We moved to a third mooring after I saw that it was clear. Hate to think what might have happened if the rope chafed through.